A Future Neither Bright Nor Brainy

In his commentary on the implications of technological change for
the future workforce, Marc S. Tucker calls our attention to several
studies that replace the now-familiar vision of a "knowledge-based"
information society with stark predictions of an economic wasteland for
the majority of future workers (Education Week, Dec. 14, 1983). Despite
the gloom of this scenario, it is refreshing to see that Mr.
Tucker--and others, including Henry Levin of Stanford University's
Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance--are
willing to consider the real implications of a high-technology
economy.

We have become a nation consumed with our educational inadequacies
and firm in our resolve to raise our educational standards to a level
we assume will be required by the intellectual demands of a
technological age. We are committed to the vision of a future nation of
"knowledge workers" who are prepared to compete in an age when all work
will be mind work and all workers will be problem-solvers. This has
created a new golden era of education reform that promises to carry us
and our nation into the Computer Age.

In such a context, a little reality comes as a breath of fresh air.
Certainly, it is better for educators to take a hard look at the real
implications of high technology than to bury our heads in the sand
(read: silicon). Therefore, I applaud Mr. Tucker's efforts to encourage
educators, and everyone else, to look at a more accurate picture of the
future, a future neither bright nor brainy, one in which a small
educated elite will run the show and the rest of us lucky enough to
have jobs will need little education or training to perform our
de-skilled, underpaid, unprotected, service-oriented functions--a
future, in other words, in which "future workers" bear some resemblance
to workers of today and are not some conveniently concocted new
species.

It is important to begin to examine the implications for education
of a "wasteland" economy, and to avoid the tendency to soften the
picture or to fabricate new mythologies in order to hold on to
cherished assumptions and convictions. Unfortunately, even Mr. Tucker
and Mr. Levin avoid confronting the very reality they encourage the
rest of us to see. Because of their commitment to traditional education
and to prevailing economic assumptions, they are forced to concoct a
specious justification for education that I call the "migrant labor
theory of educational justification." This unexamined theory, which has
become standard fare lately, implies that the purpose of education is
to enable people to continually adapt to an ever-changing labor market.
I want to examine the theory and caution against its use.

Mr. Tucker tells us that "if you accept these premises [of the new
studies], the case for better education for all cannot be argued on
economic grounds." He refuses, therefore, to accept this vision of
economic decline and proceeds to set up an alternative vision no less
fanciful than that of other futurists. The "extraordinary significance"
that Mr. Tucker initially attributes to the new studies seems in the
end to be simply their capacity to alarm us. If Mr. Tucker's fantastic
vision of "an economy based on high levels of expertise" and state-of-the-art materials and technologies is not simply another dose of nationalism wedded to high-tech futurism, I must have missed something. Or perhaps I simply have a difficult time imagining 100
million workers on the "leading edge" of anything. Mr. Tucker's vision
is unfortunate, but it is also instructive. The device he uses to
justify the need for education in his "economy of experts" is much the
same as the one Mr. Levin uses in his second of three "educational
implications of high technology." Both writers speak of the need for
education that will "ready future workers to move from challenge to
challenge," that will provide them with "an ability to adapt to a
changing work environment." This is the migrant theory.

But is adaptability really the fundamental issue here? According to
a New York Times article by Gene Maeroff, a staff reporter, "most jobs
in the next decade will require very little in the way of skill
development or training," and "more than 60,000 jobs that can be
performed with little or no prior training are available in New York
City each year." Facts like these, of course, contradict the common
notion that unskilled jobs are disappearing and that getting skills is
becoming the only way to get jobs. The truth is that skills have become
new credentials by which candidates are selected for still-plentiful
unskilled jobs (though they may be performed on computer screens).

"The real problem," concludes Bob Kuttner in an article on "The
Declining Middle" in the July 1983 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, is
"the supply of good jobs, rather than the supply of good workers. An
emphasis on education and training will make the workforce even more
frustrated than it is now."

True as this may be, it is nonetheless a bitter pill for an educator
to swallow. Some educators--Mr. Tucker and Mr. Levin in
particular--have instead found another reason to educate everyone.
Focusing on the familiar assumption that rapid technological changes
during a worker's lifetime will force each worker to shift to several
types of jobs during his or her years of employment, these educators
argue that tomorrow's average worker will have to be able to adapt and
learn far more readily than today's counterpart. This adaptability
itself, this capacity for migration, thus becomes the goal of
traditional education and serves as a new justification for education
in a world in which no single job requires much education at all.

What sort of education is believed necessary for such adaptability?
Mr. Tucker tells us future workers must be educated broadly enough to
move from challenge to challenge--"We need a labor force that is
creative, knowledgeable, and flexible." We may argue that moving from
one "de-skilled" service job to another hardly means going from
"challenge to challenge." Still, argues Mr. Levin in a paper on "The
Educational Implications of High Technology," "adaptation requires a
sufficient store of information about culture, language, society, and
technology, as well as the ability to apply that information and
acquire new knowledge."

This is, unfortunately, all that either educator says about
"education for adaptability," and it is hardly sufficient or
convincing. I keep imagining myself explaining to a class of reluctant
learners, who already see little if any relevance to jobs in what they
are taught, that they are really being taught how to move successfully
from job to job. They would be justified in suspecting some
sleight-of-hand on my part. The argument that a solid general education
is necessary for successful adaptation in a de-skilled job market is
clearly implausible.

There are too many luckless laborers already, forced to migrate from
job to job, whose success or failure hardly depends on a "store" of
information about culture, language, and technology. Rather, the
availability of jobs for which these workers have specific experience
or credentials is the key. Ask anyone looking for a job these days if
this is true.

It would not be surprising to find employers taking an interest in
the "education for adaptability" argument, however. Mr. Maeroff's
article notes that "the barriers to employment for most students [and
future workers] are not that they lack particular skills, but that they
do not understand what is expected of them on the job." Socializing
skills acquired in the long process of general education are what
typically interest employers, and I wonder whether the "education for
adaptability" argument is not primarily a vehicle for justifying
traditional, loosely conceived comprehensive education, while fostering
an acquiescence in a new set of job realities.

Until these questions are examined, this "adaptability" argument
will remain a lame, last-ditch effort to justify traditional
educational practice in a world that may no longer need it.

It is important to realize that we are at a moment in history when,
for more people than ever before, the belief that education leads to
jobs and economic prosperity is being weakened (although the hold of
this idea on our collective consciousness is still strong). Perhaps it
is time to let go of the old patterns of "education justification," of
which the simplistic "migrant theory" is but the last in a long
line.

But it is time to realize that an education system whose underlying
rationale is to keep this country internationally competitive--such as
in Mr. Tucker's version--ignores these facts about large American
companies, especially high-technology companies: They are decreasingly
labor-intensive; they are increasingly exporting their labor and
lowering the level of skills they need; they are moving away from
domestic production; and they are automating in order to permanently
reduce their labor needs. In other words, the wealth and
competitiveness of American companies are no longer reflected in the
wealth of the nation, and an education system with the object of
producing skilled workers for these companies really does nothing to
enhance the number or quality of American jobs available to those
workers. That is the true problem.

It is time to realize that educating people primarily to enable them
to cope, to survive, to increase their chances within a deteriorating
job market--however important--still does not address the central
issue, nor is this a particularly noble aim for education. It is
instructive that neither Mr. Tucker nor Mr. Levin is concerned with
educating people to understand why the skills required in work are
deteriorating, why the middle class is "disappearing," why smokestack
industries are in decline, and why technological change must result in
rapid job transformation. It is to their credit that they acknowledge
these trends at all, given the exuberant "futurism" on all sides, and
it is to Mr. Tucker's credit that he refuses to accept workers' dismal
prospects passively.

Neither writer, however, sees education as a means of understanding
our situation in order to improve it. While Mr. Tucker shares the
popular though mistaken view that education is the number one
ingredient of a solution to the nation's problems of productivity and
competition, neither Mr. Levin nor Mr. Tucker explore the possibility
that education designed to help people understand the present might be
the number one way to change the future.

In a world in which the frantic, competitive, defensive demand for
schooling as the only means of getting a job or getting ahead is
beginning to make less sense, educators are finally free to reconsider
the more fundamental values of a genuine education. If we can manage to
forget about the pseudomeritocratic arguments for education, we might
just begin to discover its potential and its justification. Such
justification, often seen "merely" as "education for its own sake,"
might not attract lucrative investment or perpetuate the educational
apparatus as we now know it, but it can still be the starting point for
genuine educators.

Ironically, the structural deterioration of American labor can be
the golden opportunity for educators to see just what their enterprise,
stripped of a century of false trappings, is all about. As long as we
refuse to attribute these changes to "technological progress," or to
inevitable changes in the international marketplace, or to some other
predetermined forces beyond our control, we might begin to understand
that we can alter the course of our own future by understanding how we
got here.

The single fact that has always disturbed me most about education in
this country, especially in my work with "disadvantaged" youths and
adults, has been this contradiction: Education by its very nature tries
to draw out the fullest potential in each person so that each can make
his or her fullest contribution to society; yet this society strives to
achieve its ends with the least contribution and the least realized
potential of its citizens. That is what technology and automation are
really all about, and that is why we live in a land of increasing
unemployment and underemployment. The genuine education of citizens has
in fact become a liability to the engines of production in this
society--all rhetoric about the need for "skilled labor" to the
contrary.

Educating people to understand this contradiction, to examine its
history, to grasp its implications, and to seek ways to transcend it
might be a good place to start our fresh new look at the place of
education in American society. Let us leave the "future" to others. The
justification of education must start now.

Douglas D. Noble is a "migrant" teacher, currently at the State University of New York College at Brockport.

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